1 essential tip for sewing together oddly shaped fabric pieces

Yesterday on QUILTsocial I shared with you my 2 favorite tips for sewing with directional fabrics and we made two rows of pieced blocks for our Artisan Spirit City Scene lap quilt.

Today, I’m going to be cutting up that beautiful City Scene panel and we’re going to sew everything together to make the quilt top.

Cutting the panel

Our next step is to cut the panel. I showed you a few different options in my post on Wednesday, but the one that I liked the best was the last one with the diagonal cuts. Using my rotary cutter and ruler, I lined up and cut from the bottom edge of the panel to the left side. As you can see, I’ve left the selvage edges on the panel – we’ll trim those off later on.

Deciding where to cut

From the dark gray ColorWorks fabric, cut ten strips 1½” across the width of fabric. Take one of these strips and pin it to the edge of one of the panel segments. Before sewing, flip the sashing strip right side up – the ColorWorks sashing strip must be lined up correctly so that when it’s sewn and flipped back to press, the far edge is long enough to allow for proper trimming. If I were to just line up the end of the sashing strip with the end of the panel point, when it’s flipped right side up, there isn’t enough sashing to trim even with the edge of the panel.

Incorrect alignment of sashing strip

As you can see in the picture below, the sashing strip must extend quite a ways past the edge of the panel to allow enough fabric for trimming.

Correct alignment of sashing strip

Sewing the panel sections back together

Now that the sashing has been sewn to the one side of the panel, the other side of the panel must be attached to the sashing. This can get tricky when the pieces are not square.

TIP To make sure that they line up correctly, use a fabric marker to mark a ¼” line from the edge of the sashing and a ¼” up from the edge of the panel. The intersecting point will be used for pinning.

Marking the ¼” seam

Mark the same two lines on the second piece of the panel, ¼” from the edge and from the bottom.

Mark the ¼” on the panel

Put these two pieces of fabric right side together and insert a pin so that it goes through the intersection point on both the sashing and the panel and then pin the two pieces together and sew.

Insert a pin at the intersecting point

Even though the bottom edges of the City Scene panel will match up when the sashing is added, the side seams will not and will be trimmed off after all of the sashing strips have been added.

The side of the panel

Continue to slice, and add sashing strips across the panel on different angles. I’ve chosen to add four sashing strips, but you can add as many as you’d like!

Once you’ve finished with this step, trim the top and bottom of the panel straight and then measure your pieced rows (that were made yesterday) and trim the panel so that it’s this exact width. Write down this measurement as you’ll be cutting all of the remaining strips of fabric for the lap quilt this same size.

The panel with sashing strips

From fabric #21879-63 cut one strip 4″ wide across the width of fabric and one strip 5″ wide.

Trim them to the same length as the pieced rows.

Cut the six remaining ColorWorks sashing strips the same length as the other strips.

Sew one sashing strip to the top and bottom of one of the pieced rows and then sew the 4″ strip of fabric #21879-63 to the bottom and the 5″ wide strip to the top. Sew another ColorWorks strip to the bottom of these rows and then sew this entire section to the top of the panel.

Top rows of the quilt

Repeat this same process using fabric #21874-64, except that you’ll be sewing the 4″ wide strip to the top and the 5″ wide strip to the bottom. The final ColorWorks sashing strip is sewn to the top of these rows and then this entire section is sewn to the bottom of the panel.

Below is how the finished quilt top looks.

The finished quilt top

This finished top measures approximately 42″ x 65″. A good lap sized quilt. If you wanted to make it bigger, just add an inner border of the ColorWorks gray (cut at 2½” wide) and then add an outer border of one of the coordinating fabrics (cut at 6″ wide). This would result in a quilt that is 57″ x 80″!

Use the remaining ColorWorks gray fabric to make binding that is 2½” wide.

Artisan Spirit City Scene

This City Scene fabric is so beautiful and I just love the finished quilt! We are planning a trip to New York City this fall and using this fabric has got me even more excited! I hope that you’ve enjoyed learning about some of the awesome features on the Northcott website and seeing how these great fabrics can be used in different projects!

I have been designing and publishing quilt patterns for the last 16 years under the business name Fairfield Road Designs. My patterns range from fusible applique and piecing to felted wool applique and punchneedle. You can see all of patterns on my website www.fairfieldroaddesigns.com.